Nestle, Tyson and meals giants depend on air fryers

A hot air fryer for sale at the Kroger Marketplace in Versailles, Kentucky, USA on Tuesday November 24, 2020.

Scotty Perry | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Kettle Foods, known for its kettle-boiled potato chips, recently introduced what it calls “the future of the potato chip category”: air fried chips.

The Campbell Soup The brand’s snack launch, made with patent-pending technology, is the latest example of Big Food banking on consumer love for anything cooked in air fryers.

According to market research firm The NPD Group, U.S. consumers spent nearly $1 billion on air fryers in 2022, up 51% from 2019. Sales of the cooking device have skyrocketed since 2017, gaining an additional one in the early days of the pandemic Boost as people cooked more at home.

And now, with more workers returning to the office and spending less time in the kitchen, consumers are increasingly turning to portable convection ovens. Joe Derochowski, cottage industry consultant at the NPD Group, said the main benefit is the ease and speed with which the device can be used, as well as the ability to achieve a crispy texture without frying. And food manufacturers want to benefit from this trend.

“They say, necessity is the mother of invention. And in this case, the need is to keep growing sales,” said Ken Harris, managing partner of Cadent Consulting Group. “The best way to increase sales is to take behavior you already have and find a new use for that behavior.”

Big food companies like Kraft Heinz And nestle saw a surge in sales early in the pandemic. As consumers return to eating out and cooking less, food manufacturers’ sales continued to grow thanks to double-digit price increases. But as shoppers’ grocery bills soared in 2022, they began buying cheaper options instead, resulting in shrinking volume.

As inflation cools and retailers put pressure on suppliers to stop raising prices, food companies will have to look elsewhere for growth.

Adam Graves, president of Nestlé’s pizza and snacking business in the US, said the company is borrowing from the air fryer boom with its frozen food brands, specifically to offer customers added value.

“It’s the biggest trend we’re seeing in the modern kitchen right now,” said Graves, who owns two air fryers himself.

Last year, Nestlé launched pizza bites under its DiGiorno and Stouffer’s brands. The packaging of both lines tells consumers, “Try it in your air fryer.” Other Nestle products, like Hot Pockets, now include air fryer cooking instructions, as well as instructions for heating in the microwave and oven.

Tyson Foods jumped on the trend relatively early, launching its air fried line in 2019. The products, which range from chicken strips to the latest Parmesan seasoned chicken bites, contain 75% less fat. Tyson brand senior marketing director Colleen Hall said the line has achieved annual retail sales of about $100 million.

Tyson has also gone a third of the way by adding air fryer instructions to its packaging for its frozen ready meals.

“If you look at how often it’s used as a preparation method, it’s about 5%,” Hall said. “I think consumers want to use it more, they want more ways to use it. So it’s a good time for us to put it on our packaging.”

According to Hall, citing recent data on brand health, hot air fryer directions boost Tyson’s brand preference. She attributed this to the convenience of the device and the perceived health benefits of the cooking process.

For fish finger maker Gorton’s Seafood, increasing its use of air frying is a means of retaining the customers it’s won during the pandemic lockdowns.

“[The pandemic] was a pretty dramatic change that brought a lot of new households into our category and into the brand,” Jake Holbrook, Gorton’s vice president of marketing, told CNBC. “And we’ve worked hard through our messaging and our products to keep these customers in the category and making Americans eat more seafood.”

The train fills up

Air frying is the second most popular way to heat frozen ready meals, according to Holbrook.

The Nissui-owned company jumped on the trend by posting air fryer cooking guides on its website. Then it added the instructions on the packaging. Air fried butterfly prawns and air fried fish fillets were introduced in January.

Gorton’s introduced air fried fish fillets and air fried butterfly shrimp nationally in January.

Source: Gorton’s Seafood

Gorton’s new butterfly shrimp and fish fillets were air-fried before packaging, but consumers can reheat the seafood by re-air-frying. The product packaging advertises 50% less fat.

“Everyone’s going to jump on this bandwagon over the next two years as long as it’s trending,” Harris said.

Other food manufacturers following the trend include Kellogg, which began adding air fryers to its plant-based products from Morningstar Farms in early 2021 in response to customer requests. Also, Hormel food has responded to consumer demand for air fryers by updating its packaging and adding recipes to its website and cooking videos on YouTube to create Spam Fries and Mary Kitchen Corned Beef Hash.

Nestlé has gone further and is aimed at consumers who have not yet bought an air fryer. In December, it teamed up with Insta Brands, makers of the Insta Pot and its own version of the air fryer, to give the device away. It ran a similar giveaway internally at Nestle US for its employees.

Graves estimates that about 60% of US households currently own an air fryer. But it’s not ubiquitous yet.

“If you compare it to a microwave — there’s a microwave in pretty much every home — the air fryer has a long way to go,” Harris said.

Still, it’s on track to join the microwave as a staple in US kitchens. In 2022, the air fryer overtook grills and multi-cookers to become the #4 cooking appliance, according to the NPD Group.

“I think people originally thought [the air fryer] was something that could be a fad,” said Tyson’s Hall. “It’s similar to the 1970s — people thought the same thing about the microwave.”

Brits endure from Brexit regrets and want the UK hadn’t left the EU

Polls suggest a majority of Britons now think leaving the European Union was wrong.

NurPhoto / Contributor / Getty Images

LONDON — Almost seven years and four Prime Ministers since the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union, polls suggest public sentiment has turned anti-Brexit.

In the latest YouGov poll released last week, 53% said leaving the UK was the wrong decision, versus 32% who still believed it was the right decision. Ipsos polls in January showed that 45% of the population felt Brexit had made their daily lives worse, versus just 11% who said it had made their lives better.

A survey conducted by Focaldata and UnHerd late last year found that out of around 10,000 respondents nationwide, 54% either “strongly agree” or “tend to agree” that “Britain was wrong to leave the EU”.

28% of the 632 parliamentary constituencies in Britain (England, Wales and Scotland) only slightly or strongly disagreed with the statement and only in one constituency of Boston and Skegness on the East Midlands coast did more people disagree than agree , which also had the highest percentage of Brexit votes in 2016.

The UK economy is expected to be the worst performer in the G-20 over the next two years, while a cost of living crisis and political unrest have compounded the Conservative government’s headaches.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s ruling party now trails the main opposition Labor party by more than 20 points in public polls ahead of the 2024 general election.

Anand Menon, director of the UK in a Changing Europe initiative and professor of European politics and foreign affairs at King’s College London, told CNBC that there have been two major shifts in public attitudes towards Brexit.

“The first is the growing number of people, including pro-Leave voters, who are now saying they think the government has handled Brexit badly – ​​that is, they see this as a government failure,” he said.

“The second thing is the increasing number of Leavers and other voters who see Brexit as a negative economic impact.”

This is backed up by the latest YouGov poll which found that 68% of respondents thought the government had handled Brexit poorly, versus just 21% who said the Conservatives had handled it well.

Sunak on Monday announced a new deal with the European Union aimed at tackling the Northern Ireland Protocol, a controversial part of the existing disengagement regime that enforced controls on goods being transported from Britain to Northern Ireland via the Irish Sea.

It remains to be seen if this will pan out in Conservatives’ favor at all, but YouGov found that those who now regret voting to leave make up 7% of voters (excluding those who would not vote).

“Before the 2019 general election, that figure was around 4%. These changes may not seem massive, but given the stagnant opinions on EU membership since the referendum, this change in preferences could have an impact,” said the pollster.

“Those who voted to leave but are now unsure if it was the right decision now make up another 4% of voters, leaving the total pool of exits who no longer think it was the right decision to be about accounts for one in nine voters (11%).”

The economic environment in the UK is “extremely challenging” compared to Europe, says the CEO

Menon noted that ironically, in early 2020 shortly after the UK left the EU, Brexit began to negatively affect the economy, but the impact has been clouded by the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Sectors from agriculture and fisheries to car manufacturing and pharmaceuticals have highlighted difficulties they have faced as a direct result of Brexit in recent years.

Now, Menon argued that the opposite is happening, as many of Britain’s current economic woes are not primarily due to Brexit, but instead spotlighting its adverse effects.

“There is absolutely no doubt that Brexit is partly to blame for the pretty bad economic numbers we’re seeing out of the UK, particularly bad compared to other G-7 economies,” he said.

But longer-term factors were at play, and he suggested that a long stagnation in living standards, caused in part by David Cameron’s government’s austerity policies, contributed to the anger unleashed in the working class at the Brexit vote.

Brexit is “redefined”

Former Prime Minister Boris Johnson won a landslide election victory in 2019 by pledging to “get Brexit done” and touting a “furnished” exit deal he negotiated with the European Union. In that campaign, the Conservative pro-Brexit candidates overturned a wave of former “Red Wall” Labor constituencies.

Menon stressed that more than three years later, Brexit is being “redefined” – from a cultural, values-based issue uniting voters who might otherwise be fiercely bickering about the economy, to a primarily economic issue.

“This is problematic for the government because the Brexit coalition that Boris Johnson put together is united on cultural issues but very divided on economic issues and therefore cannot respond effectively and in a coordinated manner and we see this in the parliamentary Conservative Party .” he explained.

“There are arguments about things on which most political parties in the past have basically agreed, namely the fundamentals of economic strategy.”

Changes to Northern Ireland Protocol could be opposed by some lawmakers, says an analyst

Also, Brexit is no longer a focus for most voters. The latest Ipsos Issues Index showed that the National Health Service is the issue of most concern to the public, with 42% of respondents mentioning it. The economy and inflation, which had dominated the series last year, were cited by 37% and 36%, respectively.

In January 2019, the year of the last general election, Brexit/Europe was a key issue for 72% of voters, the biggest concern since September 1974. By October 2022, this proportion had fallen to 6%.

Issues such as the UK’s recent vegetable shortages and rising food prices have been linked to Brexit by British political commentators and lawmakers of certain persuasions. Menon suggested that Brexit advocates could try to make the same causal link if the economy has recovered three years from now, if only in terms of how people are feeling on a day-to-day basis.

“There isn’t necessarily a causal link between the two, just like there isn’t necessarily a close causal link between the cost-of-living crisis and Brexit, but people will play it up politically and it will then be interesting to see what happens to public opinion. It’s very early,” he said.

Amazon, Wells Fargo, Microsoft, Nvidia are within the headlines. Take our membership

The regulator was concerned about Amazon’s dual role as both a marketplace and a competitor to merchants selling on its platform.

Nathan Stirk | Getty Images

club holdings Amazon (AMZN), Wells Fargo (WFC) as well NVIDIA (NVDA) and Microsoft (MSFT) are in the news Wednesday. Here are the headlines and the implications for the club’s investment thesis.

VPR’ Tom Sandoval breaks silence on Ariana Madix break up

Tom Sandoval is SUR-ving a statement after partitioning with Ariana Madix.

On March 4, the Vanderpump Rules star addressed the breakup, which rocked fans and castmates alike.

“Hey, I understand and totally deserve your anger and disappointment towards me, but please go [Tom] blackmy friends and family from this situation,” he wrote on Instagram. “It was a very personal thing.”

He also offered employees at his new restaurant, Schwartz and Sandy’s, an apology for how his actions may have impacted business.

“You did nothing wrong,” he said. “I am so sorry that my partners, Greg, board, Schwartz and our employees must suffer for my actions. I will step back and take a break out of respect for my employees and partners. I need some time to address everything else. Sorry for everything.”

Shortly after his statement was released, some of Tom’s co-stars reacted to the news on their own social media accounts.

Trump was reportedly unable to fill the ballroom at CPAC

Trump claimed they would be hanging from the rafters for his speech at CPAC, but a reporter at the scene said the ballroom was about 85% full.

Yahoo News’ Tom LoBianco tweeted this image as Trump took the stage:

Trump soundtrack plays and Trump takes the stage at #cpac pic.twitter.com/yPwCGxS4dt

— Tom LoBianco (@tomlobianco) March 4, 2023

LoBianco reported that the ballroom was 85% full when Trump took the stage:

Ballroom about 85 percent full for Trump’s speech at #cpac

— Tom LoBianco (@tomlobianco) March 4, 2023

Most of the other speakers at CPAC drew crowds that were half full or less, making 85% the largest crowd at the conference by far. The problem is that CPAC was basically described as a Trump event. It’s full of its followers. Trump won the Presidential straw poll 60%-20% over Ron DeSantis, so this is a big, heavy Trump crowd, and he still hasn’t been able to fill a ballroom, despite the former president’s claims of “thousands and thousands” of people failed there.

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If Trump fails to fill CPAC, it’s an ominous sign of his overall voting prowess. Trump’s supporters have been described as sectarian. His support remains intense and likely large enough to win the Republican presidential primary.

The energy in the room was described as lower than previous Trump CPAC appearances. If Trump were a movie franchise, he’d be nearing his direct-to-video stage.

Trump may be running on steam, but he still seems stronger than any of the other GOP presidential contenders.

Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House press pool and congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a bachelor’s degree in political science. His thesis focused on public policy with a specialization in social reform movements.

Awards and professional memberships

Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and the American Political Science Association

Leylah Fernandez urges athletes to turn out to be financially literate

Leylah Annie Fernandez of Canada returns a backhand against Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova of Russia during their singles first round match at Internazionali BNL D’Italia at Foro Italico on May 09, 2022 in Rome, Italy.

Alex Pantling | Getty Images

Leylah Fernandez is no ordinary 20-year-old. She is one of the best tennis players in the world. She has won two Women’s Tennis Association titles and was a 2021 US Open finalist.

But Fernandez is also making a name for herself off the court – and she is passionate about financial literacy.

This week Fernandez was in New York as MorganStanley and the WTA announced a new, multi-year global partnership. The program promotes inclusion and expands access to the game of tennis. In addition, the partnership includes financial education and planning resources for players.

“Morgan Stanley’s partnership with the WTA is a huge step forward for women’s sport in general. I’m excited to see companies supporting women’s sports because there’s so much we can do together and improve together,” Morgan Stanley brand ambassador Fernandez told CNBC in an interview Wednesday.

Fernandez said many of her competitors are worried about having a career-ending injury and not knowing what to do. The Morgan-Stanley program will help prepare, she added.

“We focus on tennis our whole lives. That’s all we know, but we can’t always rely on it. I want to have that stability, that thought that everything is going to be fine and that we need to have those resources,” she said.

Given her connection to Morgan Stanley, Fernandez said she feels an additional responsibility not only to ask financial questions for her own good, but to encourage others on the tour to have the same confidence.

“It would be great if we could have conferences to open the conversation in a healthy environment where WTA players feel comfortable speaking their minds. I think the difficulty is that we want to be perceived as strong and we want to know everything, but we don’t,” she told CNBC.

Morgan Stanley was drawn to Fernandez’s example of leadership.

“She is a role model that people can see themselves in. It also reflects our brand values, including giving back to the community and valuing equity and inclusion,” said Alice Milligan, Morgan Stanley’s chief marketing officer.

Alice Milligan, Leylah Annie Fernandez and Micky Lawler attend the Morgan Stanley x Women’s Tennis Association Partnership Launch on March 1, 2023 in New York City.

Mike Coppola | Getty Images

In addition to her involvement with Morgan Stanley, she has worked with Fernandez Lululemon, alphabet‘s Google and Subway. Fernandez said she learned a lot from her experience in the business world.

“In the beginning I was afraid to ask questions because I feared it would be stupid or way too easy, but asking questions is the most important thing. I need to be financially stable in post-tennis life, so participating will open my eyes and mind to a new world,” she told CNBC.

While Fernandez, who hails from Canada, travels the world to tennis tournaments and climbed to a career rank of 13 last summer, her education is making her priority. She is studying business administration at Indiana University East, which, along with the Women’s Tennis Benefits Association, has a partnership with the WTA to allow players to graduate high school online while competing on the tour.

As for her future ambitions outside of tennis, she said it’s very early days but she wants to learn more about the business and the stock market. She said working with a Wall Street giant on this front is helpful.

“I don’t want to make drastic decisions so quickly without knowing all the details. That’s why it’s so great that I’m working with Morgan Stanley to help me understand that you can’t just put all your coins in one stock,” said Fernández.

DEA and FDA guidelines exacerbate Adderall deficiency

30 mg tablets Adderall XR from Shire Plc.

JB Reed | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Josh Disbrow is Chairman and CEO of Aytu BioPharma, which makes a competing drug used to treat ADHD called Adzenys XR-ODT.

A nationwide shortage of Adderall has left many patients struggling to manage their Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, better known as ADHD. According to all indications, deliveries are likely to remain tight for a few more months.

Blame for these shortages has been placed on manufacturers, the rise of telemedicine, and an increase in Adderall prescriptions and abuse. But finger pointing is of little help to the many who depend on constant access to ADHD medication. Real solutions are announced.

With the increasing prevalence of ADHD in patients of all ages, it’s time for policymakers to reconsider how these essential drugs—and the providers who prescribe and administer them to patients—are regulated. This is the only way we can ensure that such bottlenecks do not occur again.

ADHD diagnoses have increased dramatically in recent decades. For example, between 1999 and 2010, the prevalence of diagnosed cases in adults almost quintupled. Between 2010 and 2017, diagnoses in children increased by 31%.

As you can imagine, these trends have greatly increased the demand for stimulants to treat ADHD, including Adderall. Among adults aged 22 to 44, Adderall prescriptions increased by 7.4% between 2019 and 2020. The following year, prescriptions in this age group increased by more than 15%.

There’s no denying that exploding demand for Adderall, coupled with manufacturing delays at Teva, one of the drug’s largest manufacturers, is partly to blame for the current shortage. But the supply chains for Adderall wouldn’t be nearly as fragile if it weren’t for some of the federal regulations on the drug.

Consider the role of the Drug Enforcement Administration in managing overall ADHD drug availability. Because Adderall is designated a Schedule II controlled substance, the DEA imposes aggregate production quotas that limit how much manufacturers can manufacture each year.

To set such quotas, the DEA must estimate how much Adderall American patients will need in the following year. If the agency initially underestimates the demand and does not increase its quota in good time due to new information, bottlenecks can occur across the board. In 2011, for example, pharmaceutical company Shire pointed to the DEA’s slow process of approving quota increases as the underlying cause of that year’s shortage of Adderall XR, a related ADHD drug.

But even today, with Adderall still in short supply across the country, the DEA shows no signs of increasing its production quota anytime soon.

This isn’t the only way that cumbersome bureaucracy makes it difficult for ADHD sufferers to keep track of their medications. The Food and Drug Administration’s regulations on drug substitutability are another culprit.

Ideally, in the event that a pharmacy runs out of a drug like Adderall, a pharmacist should be free to substitute a comparable drug. However, under current FDA regulations, only drugs with so-called A or B equivalence codes can be exchanged in this way.

For medicines that do not meet this strict standard, pharmacists must contact the prescribing doctor, obtain a new prescription and cancel the previous one before dispensing the substitute.

This type of process is necessary to limit what medications a pharmacist can dispense without first consulting a patient’s doctor. But it can create significant obstacles for patients who want timely refills. In some cases, the process of substituting a drug like Adderall can drag on for days, forcing patients to give up – sometimes even developing painful and annoying withdrawal symptoms.

The FDA should explore ways to provide pharmacists with more substitution flexibility within the current framework, particularly during times of shortage. The agency can also strengthen the general education of pharmacists and physicians to which they can exchange comparable medicines.

Updating federal regulations could help prevent the worst consequences of an ongoing drug shortage. It is high time to do so.

Former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen is awaiting testimony from the grand jury

Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s former personal attorney, said Friday he believes he will be called before a New York grand jury “very soon” to gather evidence in a criminal investigation into the former president.

Cohen’s comments came as he was on his way to meet for the 18th time with the Manhattan Attorney’s Office conducting the investigation related to hush money payments to two women who said they had had sexual relations with Trump.

A former top Trump aide, Kellyanne Conway, met with the prosecutor’s office on Wednesday, the New York Times reported.

“I look forward to speaking and being presented before the grand jury,” Cohen told NBC News and other reporters.

“I have a lot to do today, but I suspect it will be very soon,” added Cohen.

Cohen arranged payments to porn star Stormy Daniels and Playboy model Karen McDougal to silence them ahead of the 2016 presidential election over alleged ties to Trump, whose campaign was being led by Conway at the time.

In Daniels’ case, Cohen paid her $130,000, but in McDougal’s case, the then-parent company of supermarket tabloid The National Enquirer paid her $150,000.

Cohen wrote in his 2020 memoir, after paying Daniels, “I called Trump to confirm the transaction was complete and all paperwork was in place, but he didn’t pick up my call — obviously a very bad one in hindsight.” Sign. “

But Conway “called and said she would share the good news,” Cohen wrote.

Cohen pleaded guilty in 2018 to the payoffs to the two women and other illegal acts.

Trump has denied having sex with either woman or any other wrongdoing.

The Times reported this week that former Enquirer editor David Pecker and former Enquirer editor Dylan Howard have both testified before the grand jury, as have two employees of Trump’s company, the Trump Organization. Keith Davidson, a former lawyer for Daniels, told the newspaper.

Cohen’s attorney Lanny Davis on Friday paid a compliment to Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and “his team of prosecutors.”

“We were very impressed with how meticulous and detailed documents and text messages and lots of evidence were built around this narrative of Stormy Daniels and the hush money,” Davis said, according to NBC News.

When asked by a reporter if he was confident Bragg would press charges in the case, Davis said, “I’m not going to use the charge word, I’ll wait and see.”

“But there’s no doubt how they’re going about it,” Davis said. “Michael is key to all of this … and he will be the key witness, and Mr. Trump will finally be held accountable before a jury of peers,” Davis said. “Then we’ll see if he’s guilty or innocent.”

A Trump attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In addition to the Manhattan Attorney’s Office investigation, Trump faces three other criminal investigations.

In Atlanta, the local district attorney is investigating Trump, his campaign attorneys and others in connection with his efforts to reverse his loss to that state’s President Joe Biden in the 2020 election.

And in Washington, DC, Special Counsel Jack Smith is overseeing a Justice Department investigation into Trump’s attempt to reverse Biden’s Electoral College victory and his actions leading up to and including the Jan. 6, 2021 uprising by his supporters, which was interrupted at a joint session of Congress, which confirmed that Biden had won.

Smith is also investigating whether Trump obstructed justice and otherwise broke the law when, after leaving office, he took hundreds of government documents, many classified as classified, and stored them at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach , Florida.

Trump denies wrongdoing in all of these cases.

Biden warns of GOP plans to restrict entry to well being care

US President Joe Biden will deliver a scathing critique of Republican policies during a speech in Virginia Beach on Tuesday afternoon, in which he will warn of plans by the GOP to cut access to federal health care programs.

In his speech at the Kempsville Recreation Center, Biden will point to GOP proposals to repeal the Affordable Care Act and cut funding for Medicaid, two programs that nearly one in four Virginians rely on for coverage.

The speech comes just over a week ahead of the planned White House Presenting Biden’s fiscal 2024 budget to Congress while the White House and House Republicans continue to bicker over spending cuts and the debt ceiling.

Republicans have insisted that Biden cut spending under a deal to raise the debt ceiling — a proposal Biden will not negotiate. While he agrees that federal spending needs to be cut, he is vehemently opposed to tying it to the debt ceiling. Biden met with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy at the White House earlier this month to discuss the issue, but no agreements were reached.

Removing the debt ceiling does not justify new spending; it allows the government to borrow more money to cover existing obligations. And since the federal government repeatedly spends more than it takes in from taxes, the legislature has to raise the debt ceiling periodically. Failure to raise the debt ceiling could cause the government to default and halt day-to-day operations, creating potential turmoil in markets and the economy.

The Treasury Department has already taken a number of extraordinary steps to continue paying the government’s bills and expects these measures will be enough to avoid a default until at least early June. But if Congress doesn’t raise or suspend the debt limit by then, it could wreak economic havoc around the world.

Biden has asked House Republicans to come up with their own budget proposal detailing the spending cuts they want before moving on to his. In Tuesday’s speech, the president will point to existing GOP proposals to argue that the party ultimately aims to slash those benefits.

With McCarthy yet to come up with a budget proposal, it’s unclear how many of the ideas Biden cited will be actively considered by the House GOP. McCarthy said cuts to popular Social Security and Medicare programs are “off the table” in any debt ceiling talks.

Brittany Renner on criticism she obtained relationship PJ Washington

In the latest episode of Stepping Into The Shade Room, Brittany Renner speaks candidly about her years on social media, her current views on romance, and her past relationship with NBA player and father of her child, PJ Washington, with host Thembi.

The social media superstar and fitness model became famous for her transparent views on sexuality. As well as showing off her attractive figure. Though some have disagreed with Renner’s opinions over the years, she remains true to herself and takes the time to share more of her “truth.”

Brittany Renner reflects on the criticism she received during her date with Washington

During the interview, Thembi questioned Renner about the criticism she received during her previous relationship with NBA player PJ Washington. At the time, Renner was 26 and Washington was 18.

Additionally, many people saw her as “trying to catch a come-up.”

I always wanted a relationship, I was always a one man woman. I think a lot of that narrative stems from when he tweeted, “You were just faking it the whole time.” And he never came to my rescue. So who will you believe? him or me And I’ve done nothing but play up that narrative that people think — he knows that. But why would he come to my aid when he’s mad at me?

The 31-year-old further explained that she unfortunately had to accept the criticism from all over the world. But says she can’t understand why people still have the same opinion about her today.

I don’t know why people still think the way they think about this situation. I love my child’s father more than anything. I don’t want to be with him. And our son was planned. I thought that was my type. I think it’s stupid of me to think someone who is only six years younger than me – let’s not even get into the age difference… I just really thought that was my person who understands and sees me for me because he never judged me. That’s how it looked – that’s obviously not true.

Renner went on to reiterate that if she wanted to “catch a come-up” from a man financially, she could have but never would.

Brittany Renner has been accused of “grooming” Washington throughout their relationship

As The Shade Room previously reported, Brittany Renner has been accused of “grooming” PJ Washington throughout their relationship. She was even accused of intentionally “capturing” the basketball pro when she became pregnant with her son.

However, Renner has always denied the allegations. In an exclusive interview with DJ Akademiks, she explained that she was on birth control during her date with Washington and it was actually him who wanted her to have his child.

I told you, ‘I can wait. I’m not in a hurry’…

She recounted Akademiks and recalled a conversation she had with Washington about having a child. She then shared her surprise that she hadn’t criticized other celebrity couples like Jay-Z and Beyoncé for their age difference.

Watch Stepping In The Shade Room with guest Brittany Renner above!